Khalifa — Rod Rogers

A Dark Age - six hundred years have passed since the fall of Rome. From the tip of the Italian peninsula to the Isles of Britannia, society lies desolate, fractured and bleeding. Famine and pestilence reign while petty kings struggle for supremacy and often against the sundered Christian church that had bound them together. Feudal lords battle each other, brother against brother and father against son. Beneath the yoke of incessant warfare, the blood of the downtrodden, the poor, the uneducated man and woman copiously flows.

To the south and east and across the Mediterranean Sea, a different culture has reached a pinnacle in science, in mathematics, astronomy and medicine. The religious fervor of Islam now embraces the ancient kingdoms of Persia, Egypt, and Judea. In four hundred years, the followers of Mohammad have carried stability, peace, learning and wealth from the deserts of Arabia, across the Sahara to all of Northern Africa, up the Iberian Peninsula, throughout Palestine and across Anatolia to the gates of Constantinople. In contrast to the robust and dynamic economies of this eastern empire, the western kingdoms have declined into a dark and barbarous place.

Bright embers still smolder in chaos. Castile, Genoa, and Rome - for all the decay in the body, it still contains a living heart - and in a London re-forged by William the Conqueror.
In the midst of both darkness and splendor, a few insightful and influential men consider that the path to the future lies in alliance based on common ground.

In the spirit of Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, this story follows a young Genoese woman's path into the Mediterranean Sea. Proconsul Genaro D'Alvarino daughter, Maria, takes passage on a Norman vessel bound for Castile, where she is to wed an adviser to Alfonso, the king of Castile and Leon. Off the coast of the Maghreb, Corsairs seize the ship slaughtering all save Maria.

In the months and years the follow, her convoluted and often-painful path leads from the Maghreb, across the ergs of Africa to Alexandria and Al Qahira in Egypt - from the depths of slavery to the heights of power in the wealthiest empire known to medieval man. Adolescent Maria D'Alvarino becomes the woman known as Maryam - a woman who finds her strength on common ground and becomes an agent of change amongst two empires bent on a collision course.